You, my young British friend, start a band. You choose a name — something odd, slightly unsettling. Your three-piece practices diligently. Local fame soon gives way to regional fame. Elated, you hear yourself on British radio. You cut a CD and it gets a lot of buzz on American music blogs. Since you’re doing well in your home country, you decide to take advantage of the huge US market and go on tour. Your bassist keeps saying you can’t get on MTV by playing clubs in Manchester.

You book shows all over the States, buy plane tickets, and apply for a visa, which they say will take 10 weeks. Twenty-two weeks later, you receive only two of three visas when you find out that your drummer has a name similar to that of a possible al Qaeda operative from Qatar, a country to which he’s never been. Homeland Security is now on the case, no one in the American government answers your questions, and you wait another month — and hear nothing. You miss your kick-off show in New York, then more shows pass, date by date, and your manager cancels the rest of your tour. You apologize to fans on your MySpace page, comment with thinly veiled hostility about the absurdity of the process, and shake your fist west through the morning rain, cursing the day you ever tried to deal with the dispassionate labyrinth of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

In the past two years, news has come out of the music world with disarming frequency about artists being forced to postpone or cancel shows because of visa troubles. M.I.A, Rodrigo y Gabriella, Amy Winehouse, Klaxons, the Mystery Jets, New Model Army, You Say Party! We Say Die!, and the Young Knives are just a few highly publicized examples of musicians — successful and struggling, popular and unknown — who have tried to brave the system, and failed.

The situation has not passed unnoticed by music writers and bloggers, who tend to respond with hyperbolic outrage. “The front line of America’s border system,” wrote Spin magazine this past August, “has again spared us citizens the horrors of another evildoer attempting to breach our sacred grounds: Lily Allen.” Similarly, Pitchfork Media responded to the visa denial of Canadian duo Handsome Furs, facetiously proclaiming, “Three cheers for the United States, keeping freedom-hating, free-health-care-receiving heathens like Handsome Furs out of our beautiful land.”

The problem, of course, is both broader and more nuanced than just musicians trying to get visas — sometimes succeeding, sometimes not. While this story focuses on the plight of overseas musicians and how their problems diminish the US culturally, actors (like Sanjay Dutt of India), filmmakers (like Mahamet-Saleh Haroun of Chad, who missed an April screening of three of his films at Harvard), and student/athletes (like basketball player Bol Kong, originally of Sudan, though he has lived more than half his life in Canada) encounter the same fate. The endgame is that, in the name of making ourselves safer, we may only be further isolating ourselves from a world that already views us with suspicion.

Old trickster On New Year’s Day 1980, telegrams sent from Utah arrived at the New York Times and the Daily News announcing that 50-year-old media hoaxter Alan Abel had suffered a heart attack at a ski resort near Orem, Utah. He left behind a wife, Jeanne, and daughter, Jennifer.

Music as memory When I first saw him perform, at Newport last year, I slammed pianist Marco Benevento for playing "bombastic, leadfoot, pedal-to-the-metal instrumental rock." But that was long ago in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.

Afghanistan: Just say no! The idea that the war in Afghanistan has reached a critical junction, a “now-or-never” moment that requires an additional 40,000 troops to win, is rubbish.

The Big Hurt: ''Losing'' news in brief AEROSMITH ’s disastrous summer of canceled tours and geriatric folly has taken its toll on guitarist Joe Perry, who recently told MTV that the band were on “indefinite hiatus” — which is music-industry slang for “I hate Steven Tyler.”

Joyride It is May 1966, in the Prelude Club in Harlem, an Atlantic Records release party.

Contemporary heart Music is really just a form of time, so it makes sense that our many musics represent the many different ways we wrangle with this irritatingly linear mortal coil.

An immigrant song Arizona has declared war on Mexico. SB1070, the incendiary new immigration bill signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer, has set off national boycotts, lawsuits, protests, and denouncements.

Cowardly new world I know that the ancient Mayan calendar indicated the world may end in 2012, but I doubt it. Instead, let me illustrate how bad it might get, starting in that year.

Mexican president flubs it at the Kennedy school Only a day before the Massachusetts Senate showed its true colors by approving a set of anti-immigrant amendments to the state budget — a recent change of heart that would probably not have happened had it not been for the so-called Arizona effect — the Harvard Kennedy School's Class of 2010 hosted Mexican President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa as its commencement speaker.

DRINK LIKE DON | December 08, 2009 If Mad Men has taught us anything, it's that we shouldn't go to a 1960s advertising executive for health advice.

DON'T DO IT | November 17, 2009 So, I heard that you want to trade in your skis for a snowboard this year. Maybe it'll be fun? Well, maybe, but there are a few things I'd like you to consider before you make that leap.

REVIEW: BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN | November 05, 2009 Bleeding admiration for the David Foster Wallace stories on which it’s based, John Krasinski’s directorial debut follows Sara Quinn (Julianne Nicholson) as she interviews men about their sexual proclivities for her master’s thesis.

REVIEW: AMERICAN VIOLET | April 28, 2009 Arrested for a crime she didn't commit, Dee Roberts is enlisted by an ACLU lawyer (Tim Blake Nelson) to sue the county for racist intent and stop the DA from what is continually referred to as "terrorizing the black community."

REVIEW: LYMELIFE | April 21, 2009 Like many of the bastard offspring of American Beauty and Little Miss Sunshine , Derick Martini's quirky, frustrating directorial debut seems to believe that a dystopian view of suburbia will suffice for a film